Link Spam: What it is and how to protect your site.

"Link Spam" is a growing threat to the Internet as a whole. One of the most powerful concepts introduced by the Internet is a non-geographic, interest-bound system of communities. The blogs, guestbooks, forums, and wikis that you frequent are all locations where you can contribute to and learn from a body of knowledge previously unavailable. Unfortunately, the same openness of these communities leaves them vulnerable for the growing threat of link spam. Link spam is a growing method used by "black hat" search engine optimizers to improve their search engine rankings by acquiring huge quantities of links back to their sites. Using automated programs to cycle through long lists of blogs, wikis, forums, etc. these programs automatically post to these locations with links back to their sites in the content. Below, I address a few of these types of spam, and the best available solution. Blog Spam: Blog spam is perhaps the most notorious and common method of link spam today. There are, however, multiple types of blog spam to deal with, although there is a common denominator. The two most common types of blog spam are comment spam and trackback spam. Comment spam is perhaps the most obvious type of spam. Comment spam occurs when unmoderated comments are posted to a blog entry with dubious links included. Comment spam can easily be automated, even through logins and, sometimes, CAPTCHAs. Trackback Spam is a little more complicated. Trackbacks are a method of content amalgamation - letting authors know of other interesting information on the web relating to their article. By automating a trackback request, a black hat search engine optimizer can get your blog to post a link back to the black hatter's website Forum Spam: Forum spam has two methods as well. The most common is forum post spam. In forum post spam, users post large numbers of comments in an automated fashion with links either included in the content or in the footer. Unless the forum is closely moderated, these types of posts get published and indexed by the search engines, improving the rankings of the blackhatters site. Profile Spam is another new form of forum spam. In profile spam, the blackhatter needs only to create a login for the forum, with the link listed in the profile, for them to acquire the backlink they want. By automating this procedure, they can acquire links off of your site without ever posting at all to the forum. Guestbook Spam: Guestbook spam is the oldest trick in the book. Useless entries like "I like your site, here is mine: link", fill up defenseless guestbooks across the web. While the search engines have done a decent job to stop counting guestbook spam, it is still prevalent and going strong. Like the other types of spam listed above, there is a common thread that makes them easy to capture and remove. Wiki Spam: Wiki spam is the newest kid on the block. Wikis allow almost anyone to edit the content of a page. If a crafty black hatter can hide the link into a wiki page (especially those that allow for HTML and CSS), their job is done. Automating this procedure is particularly easy as well, as most wikis do not require a login and, even worse, accessing each edit page requires a simple url change. Furthermore, many wikis allow for page creation on-the-fly without moderation. This is an incredibly easy way to get a lot of links onto your Wiki without your permission. There is hope though. The common thread between all link spam is just that - links. If a link spammer cannot acquire a lot of links, they have failed. Thus, the solution is an internet-wide throttle on user-submitted link acquisition. Sounds complicated eh? Well, it is not. LinkSleeve: http://www.linksleeve.org, a free, XML-RPC based system already works with a large number of the most popular systems out there to prevent link spam. Furthermore, because it is platform independent and uses the XML-RPC standard, it can be integrated into almost any software, period. There is even an integration with Blogger to prevent Blogger Spam. LinkSleeve is a community wide approach to fighting Link Spam, and because of its ubiquitous availability, it is most capable of addressing the issue on an internet wide level.